Michael T. Burrows

Michael T. Burrows is a marine biologist and principal investigator in ecological processes at the Scottish Marine Institute. His primary research goal is to scale up from ecology of individual animals and plants to populations, communities and ultimately whole ecosystems. He does that in three ways:

by studying the behaviour of animals and the fate of plants at the scale of individual organisms, and using this information to predict how groups of individuals might perform;

by documenting ecosystem-scale patterns in biodiversity, and to link these patterns with important environmental variables like water flow or food supply, and;

by making ecological models that try to unify processes acting at different scales into a holistic understanding of ecosystems.